Agenda Outline

Understanding India’s long-term solar PV competitiveness through investment, foreign company participation & technology innovation through the PV value-chain• Offering the greatest long-term prospects of any country globally for solar PV generation, India has moved quickly in recent years through adding more than 25GW of PV in the country. Going forward, there is broad recognition within the domestic PV sector that the next waves of multi-GW PV deployment need to stimulate domestic upstream manufacturing, enhance the quality and reliability of utility-scale plants, and optimize site returns at the O&M and asset management stages.
• The opening session of PV IndiaTech 2019 will therefore hear from leading domestic policy-makers, trade associations and investment vehicles tasked with creating a solar PV eco-system within India that utilizes both domestic and overseas know-how and expertise, to create a self-sustaining value-added, state-of-the-art value chain covering upstream production, downstream installations and ongoing plant optimization.

Benchmarking how India becomes a PV powerhouse: defining the state-of-the-art metrics today adopted by the global overseas market-leaders• A key strength of the Indian solar PV industry is the country’s willingness to welcome inward investment into the sector to ensure best-practices are adopted, to promote state-of-the-art operations across the full PV eco-system, and to enhance the competitiveness and prospects of its domestic companies.
• This session will hear from leading overseas global market-leaders from across the entire PV value-chain, outlining the state-of-the-art metrics applied today for technology-optimization, cost-reduction, utility plant design and construction, and site yield optimization.
• Companies speaking will include leading global cell makers, module producers, balance-of-systems suppliers, developers and EPCs, and O&M and asset managers.

Outlining India’s long-term demand potential: balancing domestic & overseas cell/module supply & production levels• During the past few years, India has relied heavily upon imported cells and modules from China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. This has been essential to allow deployment levels to grow at the 10GW per-annum level. However, as increased domestic production comes online in the next 3-5 years, what role will overseas suppliers play and what market-share will be available to them?
• This session will reveal the available market sizes on offer for overseas/domestic suppliers of wafers, cells, modules and BoS components such as inverters and mounting systems.
• Companies expected to be market-leaders in each of the above value-chain segments will be speaking during this session, explaining also which new technologies are likely to be introduced to the Indian market during this period.

Ensuring quality through the value-chain: what steps need to be implemented within India to provide investors with minimal risk & optimum return-on-investment• Globally, there is increased awareness today that final solar plant yield and return-on-investment is a multi-faceted phenomenon that can be traced back to manufacturing components/assembly, site-construction/BoS and operations/maintenance.
• However, due in part to highly cost-competitive reverse-auction bidding processes that have often demanded dropping site capex levels to the lowest levels, the Indian utility sector is perceived by many as having a less-than-optimum build-quality footprint.
• This session will focus specifically on learning from overseas markets and companies that have been at the forefront of quality control and auditing practices, in order to maximize utility solar quality, while keeping costs in check.
• Incorporating global production equipment suppliers, project developers, EPCs and third-party testing laboratories, speakers here will help to explain to the Indian market why a full value-chain perspective on quality is essential.

Driving India to a 20GW+ cell & module production powerhouse: what needs to happen to transform the Indian upstream sector over the next five years• India’s desire to match its end-market deployment targets with strong contributions from a thriving domestic upstream segment – falling under the wider make-in-India initiative – has created almost equal levels of opportunity and challenges in order to implement successfully.
• Indeed, just moving domestic supply levels from less than 10% today, in order to capture about half of the annual end-market installations levels in the next 3-5 years, will necessitate multi-billion dollar investments into the correct technologies being fast-tracked into multi-GW production levels over the next 12-24 months.
• The session will hear from investors, manufacturers and market-experts on how India can move into global manufacturing excellence, allowing its upstream sector to ship technology-leading products profitably, meeting the requirements of downstream industry stakeholders.

Capturing the key requirements for India’s utility site reliability through the use of specific climate & environmentally-optimized materials & components

• Materials and sub-components used for large-scale solar installations remain highly dependent on local climate and environmental factors, often being the key factors in determining site reliability and yield levels.
• This session will explain the importance of material selection and the bill-of-materials used in module production, and why the Indian market needs specific tests and checks to be in place.

Returning value to the banks & investors: the importance of qualified O&M and asset management practices within existing & future Indian utility solar farm builds• To continue receiving strong institutional investments for future utility-scale deployment within India, the banks that have financed the vast majority of solar within the country need to have confidence that existing investments can be fully optimized, while knowing that the next generation of multi-GW of deployment will have potentially higher returns on offer.
• This session will focus specifically on how global learnings in recent years at the operations-and-maintenance and asset management stages can increase investor confidence, with case-studies from some of the largest global utility sites constructed in the past few years.

Identifying global trends in utility-solar construction & their impact on the Indian solar PV sector

• In order to be positioned as a global solar industry leader over the next decade, the Indian PV industry needs to adapt quickly to the rapid changes in manufacturing technology and completed-site O&M practices that are being implemented in other multi-GW end-markets.
• Within this session, trends will be identified that are yet to impact the Indian sector, spanning the full PV value-chain, with discussions on how India can best prepare for these new innovations.